Heike Lätzsch

German field hockey player Heike Lätzsch competed in four consecutive Olympic Games, winning the silver medal in 1992 after losing the final against Spain 2-1 after extra time. Therefore, the team and all players were awarded the Silver Bay Leaf, Germany’s highest sports award. Four years later at Atlanta the team placed a disappointing sixth, and another four years later were only seventh at the Sydney Games. She crowned her career by winning the gold medal at the 2004 Athens Olympics, winning the final 2-1 against the Netherlands, and they were subsequently elected that year’s Team of The Year.

Internationally, Lätzsch won two more silver medals, at the 1991 and the 1999 European Championships, and two bronze medals at the 1995 Europeans and the 1998 Worlds. In total, she played 250 international matches from 1990-2004. Domestically, she played with Eintracht Braunschweig, RTHC Bayer Leverkusen, and Rot-Weiß Köln. In 1999 she won her only national title with Köln, and the following year also won the European Champions Cup.

By profession, Lätzsch became a graduated lawyer, working with a Cologne media consultancy, and later became a legal advisor and data security engineer. From 2008-09 she was an anti-doping advisor with the German Hockey Association. Her brother, the non-Olympian Carsten Lätzsch, was killed, along with the then chief national youth coach Günter Köppen, in a car accident near Magdeburg in 1986.